10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid, a fatty acid found in the soil based bacterium Mycobacterium vaccae, interacts with immune cells to inhibit pathways that drive inflammation and increases resilience to stress. Researchers say the findings could bring us one step closer to developing a microbe-based “stress vaccine”.

As promising as some treatments are in lab tests, unfortunately they don’t always meet hopes when translated to the real world. Now, scientists at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research have investigated a class of cancer drugs that failed in human trials, and found out why. Better yet, they went on to identify another drug that could finally make the treatment work.

It’s entirely possible that micro-machines could one day be delivering drugs inside the body, with many designs proposed in recent years. The latest comes from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), which gets around under its own power using a system similar to how submarines rise and sink.

In a new study, researchers at the University of Pécs, Hungary used cell secretions known as exosomes to regenerate the thymus, one of the most important organs in the body.

The thymus shrinks as we age

The thymus is arguably one of the most critical organs in the body, and it is where new T cells develop before being trained in the lymph nodes in order to become the soldiers of the adaptive immune system. However, as we get older, the thymus starts to shrink, its ability to create new T cells declines, and the immune cell-producing tissue increasingly turns into fat and wastes away; this process is known as thymic involution.